Message from Mars! Unboxing the April Rowan Berry Box (#gifted)

This month's Rowan Berry Box might be my favourite yet! The Message from Mars theme is so much fun and this month's box had so many fun stationery items. If you're new here, the box I'm talking about is the Rowan Berry Box by Under the Rowan Trees, and you can check out my February and March unboxing and tutorials too!

This month's box contained:

- shimmery orange envelopes and paper (if you've seen our Instagram, you'll know I love all things shimmery!)

- black card

- space themed scrapbooking paper

- a uniball white gel pen

- lots of gorgeous space themed letter writing paper

- a round stamp

- a metallic ink pad

- a circular stencil

- some super-cute space themed vinyl stickers

- a pretty A5 calendar page for April

So many fun new pieces of stationery!!

For this month's theme, I decided to make a space themed lettering piece. I found a lovely quote by Carl Sagan - "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known" but I messed up the end and ended up writing "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be happen" :(

I wanted to try a new style too, so I did the letters in a mix of capital letters and flourished capitals _ I've seen so many pieces with flourished capitals on Instagram recently!

First I sketched out the piece in the Uniball gel pen (more on that layer!) and pencil. I used the lovely circular stencil to draw some planets, added some stars and stuck one of the cute planet stickers. I used my pencil from last month's box to sketch the lettering!

I'd never used a stamp and sponge before in my artwork like this, but I really liked the effect I ended up with!

I then went over all the letters with the white gel pen. Unfortunately I did some of that too fast, so ended up smudging some of the writing, but I really like how it came out overall! You can see the whole process on my Instagram video - I forgot to take step-by-step photos as I recorded.

What's the best white gel pen?

I've used the Sakura white gelly roll (also available from Under the Rowan Trees - you can use Nusaybah10 for 10% off them or anything else!) for the past year or so, but wanted to try out the uniball one, after hearing apparently it's much better. I tested them both out on the black card in the box, and the metallic orange paper. From what I found, there wasn't a huge difference in how they looked, but the uniball one is MUCH smoother - sometimes the Sakura one can be quite temperamental. The good thing about Sakura gelly rolls though is that they are available in so many stunning colours! (Which I have found are not as temperamental as the white)

I liked the look of the look of the shiny orange paper and envelopes, but wondered if they were too metallic to write on. I used a Tombow fudenosuke brush pen on the paper and it worked perfectly! (And I got the quote right to this time!!)

Look how shiny the paper is!!

I think one of my favourite things about this box is the illustration. It's so so cute!! The stickers and scrapbook paper are full of it and the stickers I found are waterproof vinyl - look how cute they look on my water bottle!

This stunning box is still available I believe on the website - I can't wait until the next one comes!! It's the Bee themed box and is going to be so great - you can order it here, and use Nusaybah10 for 10% off (everything)!